IRELAND’S communists warned yesterday that the left’s “abdication” of opposition to the EU was driving working-class voters into the arms of the right.

The warning came in the wake of the narrow defeat of Austrian far-right Freedom Party presidential candidate Norbert Hofer.

The French National Front and the Dutch Party for Freedom are set to make serious challenges for power in next year’s elections.

In a statement following a meeting of the national executive committee of the Communist Party of Ireland, general secretary Eugene McCarten said capitalism was in the early stages of an “emerging political crisis.

“Workers are struggling to find a way forward out of the crisis and the barbarism that they face daily,” he said.

“The old order is increasingly finding it difficult to rule in the old way, but the class-consciousness of the working class has not yet matured enough to mount a challenge from the left.”

Instead, he said, it was “finding expression in support for the populist right as well as the recent emergence of ‘new forces’ wishing to fill the vacuum created by the continuing collapse of social democracy.”

Mr McCarten charged: “The growth in both of these is related to the abdication of opposition to the European Union by the left and democratic forces.

“This has left space for the emergence of the right to appear to champion national democracy and sovereignty.”

Mr McCarten said the truth of the EU was that “the interests and needs of transnational corporations are given priority over those of workers.

“The ruse of a ‘social Europe’ lies shattered upon the collapsing and decaying corpse of social democracy,” he said.